[ufmace]

I think for a while, Google sort of hoped to turn Chrome extensions into something like actual apps. They seemed to support stuff like making desktop icons for them, opening them in windows that seemed to be independent from Chrome, making them the only way to make something that seemed like a real app on Chromebooks, etc. With all of that in place, it seems to make sense to let people pay charge/pay for them. Then I guess they just kind of got tired of it, as Google tends to do, and started dropping various parts of that system.

Probably the only reason they bothered to post a notice and write a really lame migration plan is that a decent number of developers were making money from it and would pitch a fit if it just disappeared.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

Google apps (for Chrome?) were somewhat separate but under one store, they just got Android apps working on chromebooks, deprecated it and now this. It's just a push towards Android ecosystem where they make more money.